Page 12 of The Life She Could Have Lived

NO

It struck Anna, when she first woke up, that it might have been her fifth wedding anniversary.

What would that have been like? Instead of waking up next to Edward, she was in New York, city of her dreams. And it was Saturday, the best day of the week.

She missed Nia, but that was the main sticking point.

She didn’t miss Edward the way she thought she might have.

The early weeks had been bleak – getting drunk with Nia and crying, saying it had been a mistake and she was going to call him, Nia confiscating her phone.

She’d called in sick to work more than she should have, sometimes spending the entire day in bed staring at the wall opposite her, feeling nothing but empty.

And then she’d left, flown to New York, and her brain had been caught up in the excitement and fear of all of that, and by the time she was settled, she knew for sure she’d done the right thing.

This morning, though, she’d woken up with Edward on her mind.

She checked her watch. It was just after nine in the morning, which meant it was two in the afternoon in London.

She picked up her phone and called Nia, hoping she’d have time for a quick chat.

‘I was just thinking about you,’ Nia said.

‘Really? How come?’

‘I have something to tell you. I was thinking about when I could call. I was going to wait until it was at least ten your time, in case you were having a lie-in.’

‘What is it?’

‘Well, you know I’ve been seeing that guy, Jamie?’

‘The one you said looked a bit like Peter Andre? And who you weren’t sure about dating just in case he was my J man?’

‘I said that about Peter Andre once, after our first date. I can’t believe you’re still going on about it.’

Anna laughed. ‘Yes, you can. You still talk about the guy I kissed who looked a bit like a young Phillip Schofield and that was last century.’

‘I haven’t mentioned him for at least three weeks. Anyway, now we’ve established that you know who I’m talking about…’

‘Yes, sorry. What’s the news? Are things getting serious?’

‘Pretty serious. I mean, about as serious as things can get, actually. We’re…’

The line dropped out and Anna said her friend’s name a couple of times. When it came back, Nia was still speaking.

‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’

‘I missed it, Nia. The line dropped. What did you say?’

‘Oh, thank God. I thought your silence meant you disapproved. I said we’re going to have a baby.’

Anna felt sick for a second. A baby? Nia? And this guy Anna had never met who might or might not look like Peter Andre?

‘Wow,’ she managed to say. ‘That’s amazing, Nia. How do you feel? ’

Nia let out a sound that might have been a groan. ‘So sick. I’ve been dying to tell you. I’m only a few weeks pregnant, so no one at work knows yet and I have to keep running off to the toilet to retch.’

Anna felt like the worst kind of friend.

This was the biggest news Nia could have come to her with, and Nia had been waiting to tell her, and Anna didn’t know how to respond properly.

She wondered whether it was because she wasn’t there, because she couldn’t grab hold of Nia and hug her and tell her she loved her and she couldn’t wait to meet her baby, but she wasn’t sure.

A part of her, a bigger part than she wanted to admit, felt a bit cheated.

She’d said no to having a baby with Edward, but maybe it would have been different if she’d known that Nia would get pregnant so soon afterwards?

Maybe they could have done this together.

But then she shook herself, reminded herself that her marriage to Edward hadn’t been right, and you couldn’t just have a baby because your friend was having one.

She’d made the right decision. Still, she felt as if she was losing Nia.

Which was ridiculous, given that she’d been the one to move away.

‘I wish I was there,’ Anna said when the silence had gone on for too long.

‘I wish you were here too,’ Nia said. ‘You’ve always been the best person when it comes to holding my hair back.’

Anna laughed. ‘Listen, I have eggs boiling, can we talk about it properly next time?’ It was a lie, and not a good one. Would Nia be able to tell?

‘Of course. And what were you calling for, anyway? Anything in particular?’

Anna paused. Was it still okay to bring it up? To say that she’d been feeling a bit sad about Edward? She decided to go for it. She’d never held back when it came to Nia .

‘It’s my anniversary, mine and Edward’s. Or it might have been. You know what I mean.’

‘Oh. Anna, I’m sorry, I totally forgot.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly. I wouldn’t expect you to remember. I mean, what is an anniversary when you’re not even together any more? It’s nothing, is it? It just feels a bit…’

‘A bit what?’ Nia asked.

‘Funny. I don’t know.’

‘Do you miss him?’

Nia had asked this a lot in the early days. In the days of crying and packing up boxes of things and sorting out paperwork to do with the house and all of that. But she hadn’t asked it for a while.

‘I don’t miss him, as such,’ she said, then, ‘it’s just, sometimes I wonder about the life I didn’t have. The one I could have had with him, if I’d agreed to having a family.’

Nia was silent, but Anna knew it wasn’t judgement. She was just giving Anna the space to say what she needed to say.

‘Listen, Nia, I have to go,’ she said.

‘I don’t want you to be on your own over there and feeling sad,’ Nia said.

‘I’m not, honestly. I have a date tonight.’

‘Oh good. Listen, let’s talk properly tomorrow. I’m free all day.’

‘Yes,’ Anna said.

‘Have a good morning.’

‘Have a good afternoon.’

Anna ended the call feeling a little churned up.

She ate a bowl of cereal, flicked through the TV channels.

And then she called Lee. She’d met Lee on her second day in the New York office in a marketing meeting and had known immediately that she wanted him for her friend.

She’d felt pretty lost up until that point, finally understanding that thing she’d heard about Britain and the US being divided by a common language.

She got funny looks whenever she attempted something funny or sarcastic.

Lee had lived in London for three years as a student, and he claimed that was why he ‘got’ her, but Anna secretly thought he was just one of those people she would have clicked with no matter what.

‘What’s up?’ he asked.

‘Do you have time for lunch or a drink or something later?’

‘Sure.’

Anna was tempted to let the morning drift past her but instead she had a long shower and then got ready to go out.

When she’d first arrived in New York, she’d bought a map and just walked around the city for hours.

The apartment she shared was in Brooklyn, and she liked to walk across the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan, to really take in this insanely busy island that she’d once known only from films and was now starting to really feel a part of.

The map, worn and tatty from being folded and refolded, rarely came out of her bag now.

She made her way to McNally Jackson, her favourite bookshop, and browsed for half an hour.

She saw one of the books she’d worked on recently and felt the rush she always did when she spotted them out in the world.

It was a warm day with a slight breeze, and Anna bought a sandwich from a deli and ate it wandering around, window-shopping in the tiny boutiques she was too scared to step inside.

It was the kind of day she loved, just mooching around with no destination in mind.

She imagined being able to go back in time to her teenage years, to tell herself that this was what her life would be like, that she would be living in New York, working with books, carefree.

But she wasn’t sure quite what her teenage self would make of it all.

She’d be impressed by the New York thing, for sure, but she’d probably ask why Anna was single and childless.

Back then, it had all seemed much more straightforward.

When it was almost time to meet Lee, she walked back across to the Lower East Side, to the bar they liked there with its mismatched sofas and 90s posters that always reminded her of a sixth-form common room.

Lee was there already, halfway through a muddy orange cocktail that had been served in a tumbler.

‘So, what’s up?’ he asked as soon as she’d ordered a drink and sat down next to him on a low, creaky sofa.

‘I feel wobbly,’ Anna said.

‘Wobbly how? Like, sick? Or shitty and you don’t know why? Or about to burst into tears?’

Anna gave it some thought. ‘It should have been my anniversary today. Five years. And I called Nia to talk about it and she told me she’s having a baby.

And I want to be happy about it, and I am, but not as happy as I should be.

I feel like she’s leaving me behind or something.

There, I said it. I’m the worst friend in the world. ’

‘Nia, with a baby?’ Lee asked, and just that asking made Anna feel a bit better.

Nia had come over for a visit in the run up to Christmas and made it her mission to ask the staff of almost every Manhattan bar and restaurant their names, still looking for Anna’s mysterious ‘J’ man.

Anna, Nia and Lee had gone ice skating at the Rockefeller Center, although Lee had said he would die if anyone he knew saw him.

Afterwards, they’d had cocktails (served by a Brad) on empty stomachs and three drinks in, Lee and Nia had declared themselves lifelong friends.

They even thought they might just have met once, back in Lee’s London days, although they didn’t know how.

‘Exactly!’ Anna said, a little too loudly. ‘That’s exactly what I thought, and then I felt horrible about it. Do you know that when we were fifteen we did that flour experiment, you know, the one where you have to look after a bag of flour for a week?’